Three Rules of Chess

Thirty-some years ago, when I began to teach at Howard Payne University, one of my students offered to teach me to play chess. For several months, on most Friday afternoons, we played chess. I’ve played little since Bill and I quit playing, but I do remember the three rules he told me I should play by: 1) Protect the Queen; 2) Control the center; 3) Remain flexible.

My wife, daughter, and I were playing a game of Five Crowns this afternoon when a book on a nearby shelf caught my wandering attention. It was the book by Covey, et al, First Things First. When I glanced at the Table of Contents, one chapter stood out immediately, “The Main Thing Is to Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing.”

“Seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you,” is Jesus’ reminder of the need to keep the main thing the main thing. Stating the same thing differently, he also said that the main thing is to love God with all we’ve got, and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.

One of the major sources of our problems is our failing to know or acknowledge the main thing, and even more the tendency to forget the main thing as we follow tangential, but promising looking trails and never look back. Much like the common experience of doing internet searches. We begin by looking for one thing, but one helpful site has interesting links that we follow to other interesting links. An hour later we have learned much. We have learned things useful and trivial, things we had always wanted to know, and things we had never before heard of. But the main reason for our search was long forgotten, and thus never found and acted on.


My chess-playing student told me to focus on the three main things necessary to win: protect the queen, control the center, and remain flexible. I am married. We had our first date in the summer of 1950, and have been married for fifty-two-years. We are moving into life’s homestretch. I believe that to seek first the Kingdom of God and to love with a godly love, my first responsibility, since I am married, is to protect the “queen” of our home. That is the main thing that I try never to forget is the main thing. Under God everything else is secondary, is as dispensable as pawns. Protecting the queen is at the heart of marriage.

In my blogging, the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing, and in this internet relationship, the main thing is to focus on the center: The eternal love of the triune God. Serious Christian theology and ordinary cultural Christianity make a host of other things–some of them good things–central to their practice and proclamation of a Christian religion. Above all else, in my blogging I need to claim the center, renew the center, and control it against all challengers.

In a world where everything is relative, changing, connected to everything else, and where surprising novelty is a constant, without flexibility the queen can neither be protected, nor can the center be gained, much less controlled. Not the kind of flexibility that has no central core, not like nailing Jello to the wall, not like being so open-minded that our brains fall out on both sides. Rather the flexibility of bamboo, one of the strongest yet most flexible things to be found in the natural world. Rather the flexibility of the eagle or vulture, constantly adjusting to the ever-changing air with its highs and lows, its stiff winds, and its dead air. Rather the flexibility of the sailor who must constantly adjust his sails and tack with the wind in order to stay on course, in order to keep the main thing the main thing.

On an earlier occasion I have indicated that in this last phase of my life –“The last of life for which the first was made”–I have only three commitments: love my wife, write, and take care of the quotidian. Protect the queen, write to claim and control the center, and be flexible enough to maintain an ever-changing balance as life, wife, and writing make their appropriate demands.

We live in a culture that tries to sucker us off into a jillion tangential tasks and trails. Make sure you know what the main thing is, then make sure that you keep the main thing the main thing.